This specimen was produced at a point of great change in the American typefounding industry. The owners of the Central Type Foundry (Schraubstadter and St. John) had purchased the Boston Type Foundry in 1888. This specimen book, a joint effort of the two type foundries, is dated 1892. That is the year in which both companies were sold into the newly formed American Type Founders amalgamation. The bulk of the specimen book itself makes no reference to ATF. However, a final page (which is typographically distinct from the rest) advertises "Original Type Designs" for sale by many of the type foundries which amalgamated into ATF (two of which are noted as "Owned and Operated by the American Type Founders' Company"). On its title page this specimen refers only to the Central and the Boston foundries, but the cover of this particular copy bears the title "Artistic Novelties for Printers, for sale by Boston Type Foundry, Boston." It seems reasonable to conclude that this specimen was prepared jointly by the Central and Boston foundries before the formation of ATF but that this particular copy was published by the Boston Type Foundry after the formation of ATF. Many of the larger foundries which combined into ATF retained separate identities for several years. (Annenberg, in Type Foundries of America and their Catalogs, indicates that the Central did not produce a specimen under the ATF name until 1895.)

This is a PDF assembled from the Google scans of the University of Michigan copy, as presented via The Hathi Trust (Hathi ID: mdp.39015063770823 )

This is the same digitization which formerly appeared as:

http://archive.org/details/ATF1892CentralBostonSpecimen

Since it is really a Central/Boston specimen which happens to have been printed after the incorporation of ATF, it seems better to put it here rather than there.

The page images here were scanned at multiple resolutions, and so appear in different sizes. Although this makes viewing more difficult, I have not "normalized" them to a single size as that would involve the distortion of the digital information in the images.

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